The Game of Rat and Dragon Read online

  THE PLAY

  Underhill was always a little exasperated the way that Lady Mayexperienced things before he did.

  He was braced for the quick vinegar thrill of planoforming, but hecaught her report of it before his own nerves could register whathappened.

  Earth had fallen so far away that he groped for several millisecondsbefore he found the Sun in the upper rear right-hand corner of histelepathic mind.

  That was a good jump, he thought. This way we'll get there in four orfive skips.

  A few hundred miles outside the ship, the Lady May thought back athim, "O warm, O generous, O gigantic man! O brave, O friendly, Otender and huge Partner! O wonderful with you, with you so good, good,good, warm, warm, now to fight, now to go, good with you...."

  He knew that she was not thinking words, that his mind took the clearamiable babble of her cat intellect and translated it into imageswhich his own thinking could record and understand.

  Neither one of them was absorbed in the game of mutual greetings. Hereached out far beyond her range of perception to see if there wasanything near the ship. It was funny how it was possible to do twothings at once. He could scan space with his pin-set mind and yet atthe same time catch a vagrant thought of hers, a lovely, affectionatethought about a son who had had a golden face and a chest covered withsoft, incredibly downy white fur.

  While he was still searching, he caught the warning from her.

  _We jump again!_

  And so they had. The ship had moved to a second planoform. The starswere different. The Sun was immeasurably far behind. Even the neareststars were barely in contact. This was good Dragon country, this open,nasty, hollow kind of space. He reached farther, faster, sensing andlooking for danger, ready to fling the Lady May at danger wherever hefound it.

  Terror blazed up in his mind, so sharp, so clear, that it came throughas a physical wrench.

  The little girl named West had found something--something immense,long, black, sharp, greedy, horrific. She flung Captain Wow at it.

  Underhill tried to keep his own mind clear. "Watch out!" he shoutedtelepathically at the others, trying to move the Lady May around.

  At one corner of the battle, he felt the lustful rage of Captain Wowas the big Persian tomcat detonated lights while he approached thestreak of dust which threatened the ship and the people within.

  The lights scored near-misses.

  The dust flattened itself, changing from the shape of a sting-ray intothe shape of a spear.

  Not three milliseconds had elapsed.

  * * * * *

  Father Moontree was talking human words and was saying in a voice thatmoved like cold molasses out of a heavy jar, "C-A-P-T-A-I-N."Underhill knew that the sentence was going to be "Captain, move fast!"

  The battle would be fought and finished before Father Moontree gotthrough talking.

  Now, fractions of a millisecond later, the Lady May was directly inline.

  Here was where the skill and speed of the Partners came in. She couldreact faster than he. She could see the threat as an immense Ratcoming direct at her.

  She could fire the light-bombs with a discrimination which he mightmiss.

  He was connected with her mind, but he could not follow it.

  His consciousness absorbed the tearing wound inflicted by the alienenemy. It was like no wound on Earth--raw, crazy pain which startedlike a burn at his navel. He began to writhe in his chair.

  Actually he had not yet had time to move a muscle when the Lady Maystruck back at their enemy.

  Five evenly spaced photonuclear bombs blazed out across a hundredthousand miles.

  The pain in his mind and body vanished.

  He felt a moment of fierce, terrible, feral elation running throughthe mind of the Lady May as she finished her kill. It was alwaysdisappointing to the cats to find out that their enemies whom theysensed as gigantic space Rats disappeared at the moment ofdestruction.

  Then he felt her hurt, the pain and the fear that swept over both ofthem as the battle, quicker than the movement of an eyelid, had comeand gone. In the same instant, there came the sharp and acid twingeof planoform.

  Once more the ship went skip.

  He could hear Woodley thinking at him. "You don't have to bother much.This old son of a gun and I will take over for a while."

  Twice again the twinge, the skip.

  He had no idea where he was until the lights of the Caledonia spaceboard shone below.

  With a weariness that lay almost beyond the limits of thought, hethrew his mind back into rapport with the pin-set, fixing the LadyMay's projectile gently and neatly in its launching tube.

  She was half dead with fatigue, but he could feel the beat of herheart, could listen to her panting, and he grasped the grateful edgeof a thanks reaching from her mind to his.